I highlighted it in red so I wouldn't miss it.
And then forgot to post.
From the Computer Science mavens at The Association for Computing Machinery's acmqueue Research for Practice series, January 24, 2017:
Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts; Hardware for Deep Learning
Expert-curated Guides to the Best of CS Research
Our fourth installment of Research for Practice covers two of the hottest topics in computer science research and practice: cryptocurrencies and deep learning....MUCH MORE
First, Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller, co-authors of the increasingly popular open-access Princeton Bitcoin textbook, provide an overview of ongoing research in cryptocurrencies. This is a topic with a long history in the academic literature that has recently come to prominence with the rise of Bitcoin, blockchains, and similar implementations of advanced, decentralized protocols. These developments—and colorful exploits such as the DAO vulnerability in June 2016—have captured the public imagination and the eye of the popular press. In the meantime, academics have been busy, delivering new results in maintaining anonymity, ensuring usability, detecting errors, and reasoning about decentralized markets, all through the lens of these modern cryptocurrency systems. It is a pleasure having two academic experts deliver the latest updates from the burgeoning body of academic research on this subject.
Second, Song Han provides an overview of hardware trends related to another long-studied academic problem that has recently seen an explosion in popularity: deep learning. Fueled by large amounts of training data and inexpensive parallel and scale-out compute, deep-learning-model architectures have seen a massive resurgence of interest based on their excellent performance on traditionally difficult tasks such as image recognition. These deep networks are compute-intensive to train and evaluate, and many of the best minds in computer systems (e.g., the team that developed MapReduce) and AI are working to improve them. As a result, Song has provided a fantastic overview of recent advances devoted to using hardware and hardware-aware techniques to compress networks, improve their performance, and reduce their often large amounts of energy consumption.
As always, our goal in this column is to allow our readers to become experts in the latest topics in computer science research in a weekend afternoon's worth of reading. To facilitate this process, as always, we have provided open access to the ACM Digital Library for the relevant citations from these selections so you can read the research results in full. Please enjoy! —Peter Bailis
Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts
By Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller
Research into cryptocurrencies has a decades-long pedigree in academia, but decentralized cryptocurrencies (starting with Bitcoin in 2009) have taken the world by storm. Aside from being a payment mechanism "native to the Internet," the underlying blockchain technology is touted as a way to store and transact everything from property records to certificates for art and jewelry. Much of this innovation happens in the broader hobbyist and entrepreneurial communities (with increasing interest from established industry players); Bitcoin itself came from outside academia. Researchers, however, have embraced cryptocurrencies with gusto and have contributed important insights.
Here we have selected three prominent areas of inquiry from this young field. Our selections of research papers within each area focus on relevance to practitioners and avoid areas such as scalability that are of interest primarily to cryptocurrency designers. Overall, the research not only exposes important limitations and pitfalls of the technology, but also suggests ways to overcome them.
Anonymity, privacy, and confidentiality Meiklejohn, S., Pomarole, M., Jordan, G., Levchenko, K., McCoy, D., Voelker, G. M., Savage, S. 2013. A fistful of Bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names. In Internet Measurement Conference: 127-140; https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/03_meiklejohn-online.pdf.
Bitcoin exists in a state of tension between anonymity (in the sense that real identities are not required to use the system) and traceability (in that all transactions are recorded on the blockchain, which is a public, immutable, and global ledger). In practice, the privacy of vanilla Bitcoin comes from obscurity: users may create as many addresses as they like and shuffle their coins around, even creating a new address for each transaction. But this paper demonstrates that "address clustering" can be very effective, applying a combination of heuristics to link together all the pseudo-identities controlled by an individual or entity.
Anonymity in cryptocurrencies is a matter of not just personal privacy, but also confidentiality for enterprises. Given advanced transaction graph analysis techniques, without precautions, the blockchain could easily reveal cash flow and other financial details.
Sasson, E. B., Chiesa, A., Garman, C., Green, M., Miers, I., Tromer, E., Virza, M. 2014. Zerocash: decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy; http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-20140518.pdf.
There are many different proposals for improving the privacy of cryptocurrencies. These range from Bitcoin-compatible methods of "mixing" (or "joining") coins with each other, to designs for entirely new cryptocurrency protocols that build in privacy from the beginning. Perhaps the most radical proposal is Zerocash, an alternative cryptocurrency design that uses cutting-edge cryptography to hide all information from the blockchain except for the existence of transactions; each transaction is accompanied by a cryptographic, publicly verifiable proof of its own validity. Roughly, the proof ensures that the amount being spent is no more than the amount available to spend from that address. The paper is long and intricate, and the underlying mathematical assumptions are fairly new by cryptographic standards. But this fact itself is food for thought: to what extent does the security of a cryptocurrency depend on the ability to comprehend its workings?
Endpoint security
Turning to security, the Achilles' heel of cryptocurrencies has been the security of endpoints, or the devices that store the private keys that control one's coins. The cryptocurrency ecosystem has been plagued by thefts and losses resulting from lost devices, corrupted hard drives, malware, and targeted intrusions. Unlike fiat currencies, cryptocurrency theft is instantaneous, irreversible, and typically anonymous.
Eskandari, S., Barrera, D., Stobert, E., Clark, J. 2015. A first look at the usability of Bitcoin key management. Workshop on Usable Security; http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~clark/papers/2015_usec.pdf.
This paper studies six different ways to store and protect one's keys, and evaluates them on ten different criteria encompassing security, usability, and deployability. No solution fares strictly better than the rest. Users may benefit considerably from outsourcing the custody of their keys to hosted wallets, which sets up a tension with Bitcoin's decentralized ethos. Turning to Bitcoin clients and tools, the authors find problems with the metaphors and abstractions that they use. This is a ripe area for research and deployment, and innovation in usable key management will have benefits far beyond the world of cryptocurrencies.
Smart contracts
One of the hottest areas within cryptocurrencies, so-called smart contracts are agreements between two or more parties that can be automatically enforced without the need for an intermediary. For example, a vending machine can be seen as a smart contract that enforces the rule that an item will be dispensed if and only if suitable coins are deposited. Today's leading smart-contract platform is called Ethereum, whose blockchain stores long-lived programs, called contracts, and their associated state, which includes both data and currency. These programs are immutable just as data on the blockchain is, and users may interact with them with the guarantee that the program will execute exactly as specified. For example, a smart contract may promise a reward to anyone who writes two integers into the blockchain whose product is RSA-2048—a self-enforcing factorization bounty!...
